Live Chickens, Pineapples and a Honeymoon Suite

The preparations for our wedding seemed to be coming along just fine...until a friend threw poor Germán for a loop!  Ulterior motives?  Who knows?  At any rate, Germán thought I might be calling off the wedding!

I had drafted our invitation/announcement, one side in English, the other in Spanish, and given it to Germán to have them printed in Quito. But later my mom saw it and said that in one place it wasn't worded correctly.

Germán was staying in Quito with his mother, who didn't have a phone. We had arranged that if I ever needed to, I could call his friend Raúl, and he would pass on anything I needed.  So I hurriedly called Raúl and asked him to give Germán this message:  Please stop the printing process, as what I gave you has a mistake. I'm sending you a note with the correction, by bus. Please go pick it up.  (Mail wasn't dependable at all back then in our little town, so packages and letters were often sent via the passenger buses that came and went daily.)

Here's what Raúl actually told Germán:  Becky says to stop all the preparations for the wedding! It was hard for Germán to wait until he could go pick my note up and find out what was going on. Until then, all he could do was go into his room, get down on his knees and put everything into God's hands.

He was immensely relieved when he got my note! He also wondered if it had been an innocent misunderstanding or...was he intentionally misled? You see, Raúl had a couple of eligible sisters looking for husbands, and Germán was a great candidate in their eyes!!

As the date for our wedding neared, we started getting gifts - not many, because when people wondered what we needed, we asked them if they would just give us cash, since we were going to be traveling. Of course, not everybody asked, and as there were people from a number of  social levels, we got some interesting presents, including...a couple of live chickens and a couple of fresh pineapples...and the lady I told you about, who had offered us all the flowers we needed from her hotel gardens, gave us a gift of three free days and nights in her honeymoon suite!

In recalling all this with you, I thought of a poem I wrote some years ago that ties in with Germán's going to his knees to seek God's peace and guidance when things seemed so uncertain.


                            TRAIL THROUGH THE TREES

Lord,
You don't always show us
big signposts and arrows
when we're lost in the forest
and our vision narrows
                 to just two or three trees.
                 Could we see beyond these,
then maybe we might
start to make our own clearing -
less by faith, more by sight,
slowly losing our hearing
                  of the "voice that's behind",
                  saying, "This is the way.
                  If you walk it, you'll find
                  that My paths always lay
"where My Son lights the haze
'round each leaf and each root,
where His Hand clears the maze
so it won't trip your foot;
                   "where My Love warms the downpours,
                   untangles the vines;
                   where the trusting must be yours,
                   the wisdom be Mine."
When I can't see past today,
by chance or by choice,
I do best just to stay...
to stay close to Your Voice.
                     The directions for following
                     Your trail through the trees
                     may be found when I'm listening
                     for them on my knees.
                                                                    --Becky Rhon


You may have been asking why in the world we got engaged only a month after we met, and married only one-and-a-half months after that.  What was the hurry?  I'll tell you in one word: AUSTRALIA!!
Join me again soon!